As Murray Rothbard explained in
"The Anatomy of the State,"
the state cannot persist and expand through
force alone; it needs the tacit consent of the people.

Nothing bamboozles the people out of their consent like a war.

People disagree on what the proper roles of government are, but the one that virtually
everyone agrees on, in vague terms, is the defense of life, liberty
and property against aggressors. In respect to foreign policy, practically
every American believes that the government should have one. In
other words, there is near universal acceptance of the idea that
the government should have a military and should, at times, deploy
it abroad for one reason or another.

The classical liberal movement is not totally immune to this widely held belief.
In fact, there have always been liberalsfor example, John Stuart
Millwho believed that active foreign intervention was a desirable
function of the political system. And many or most libertarians
do not believe that the government should completely remove itself
from national defense the way it should from healthcare, education,
drug policy or business regulation.

Now, just to be clear, it is one thing to support, as a necessary evil,
a government role in mobilizing American forces to repel an invasion.
It is quite another to side with the military industrial complex,
its legions of foreign bases, standing armies and imperial reach;
to defend a full-blown military invasion, bombing, and occupation
of a country that didn't ever threaten America; or to champion a
long-term national project of tearing down foreign states and building
new, friendlier ones in their place.

The reason that even many skeptics of the state will make exceptions for war
is mostly obvious, indeed, superficial. No one really wants America
to be taken over by foreign tyrants and terrorists. No one thinks
that destroying the World Trade Center and the innocents in it was
a good thing. Those concerned with liberty and justice want to see
the monsters who attacked America on 9/11 caught and punished.

Add to the legitimate case for self-defense the real and perceived evils of
the Enemy, and we see why faith in the warfare state is so pervasive.
The U.S. government, after all, fought the Nazis and Communists,
and is now posing as the defender of the free world against terrorists
said to be bent on obtaining weapons of mass destruction and killing
as many innocents as it can in a demented mission to conquer the
free world and set its clock back several hundred years.

This is pretty scary stuff.

We know how much people will tolerate from government if they think it's protecting
them from common criminals, or even from less concrete threats such
as global warming, drug abuse, illiteracy, racism or inequality.
A leftist who thinks the government is protecting him from high
ATM fees, low wages, or dirty drinking water tends to feel indebted
to the state and willing to take its side over liberty and the free
market. A conservative who thinks the government is locking up hooligans
and keeping undesirables out of society will likewise side with
power over freedom in all too many cases. And anyone who believes
that the government is the only barrier standing between the American
Dream and the fall of civilization into the hands of fanatics, determined
to convert us all to their religion and behead those of us who resist,
will predictably give the government far more leeway than it deserves.

If it weren't for the tendency of people to put up with government growth and
abuses during war, it would be hard to explain why politicians are
quick to call any domestic pet project a war on something. Declaring
a war on drugs, illiteracy or poverty is such a common rhetorical
device because the partisans of state power know that there is something
about war and the language of war that compels people to tolerate
greater abuses of freedom than they otherwise would. When FDR launched
his New Deal, he asked for all the powers that he would normally
be given during war precisely because he knew that the paradigm
of war would inflate his administrative authority like nothing else.
And yet, no matter how horrific the domestic metaphorical wars,
foreign wars are worse for liberty and healthier for the state.
No matter how much cultural and material devastation we can lay
at the feet of the war on poverty, and regardless of the millions
of lives wrecked by the totalitarian drug war, both almost seem
like good government compared to what evils and transgressions a
foreign war is capable of producing.

People advised by utilitarianism and convinced that the U.S. government is all
that has stood in the way of a Nazi, Communist, or terrorist takeover,
will conclude that their own government can do practically anything
to them and especially to others as long as it is not as bad as
what the Nazis, Communists or terrorists would do. Wartime nationalism
has been instrumental in making Americans abandon the skepticism
of political power at the heart of our national heritage. It has
turned mainstream America into a statist culture, and it threatens
to do so for all but the most resistant to the temptations and promises
of power. Even many Americans who seem to understand individualism
and the wonders of spontaneous order in the market will side with
collectivism and central planning on the issue of war.

We have seen since 9/11 a startling number of presumably pro-freedom advocates
defending some of the worst violations of liberty in our time. They
have made excuses for detainments without trial, for shutting down
the opposition, and for enormous government secrecy. They will take
the administration at its word, echo the government's account of
the war as the truth. To question whether the Iraqi people are better
off, to wonder if the U.S. occupation really is liberationthese
are considered uncivil thoughts even by many who claim to love freedom.

But to take the government at its wordto assume uncritically that the state
is the source of anyone's liberationthis is not the mark
of a person eternally vigilant and jealous of his liberty. It is
the mark of a person who has succumbed to the principal components
of statist ideology.

Reason magazine contributing editor Cathy Young, who recently expressed
optimism that the 2,000 American dead in Iraq might prove to be
worth it, defended new government surveillance powers after 9/11,
saying, "[A] free society is not a suicide pact." Radio personality
Neal Boortz advocated federal spying on the antiwar movement, and
on his blog made light of a protestor who, confronting a police
officer with her peace sign, got clubbed in the face. "WHAM!" Boortz
said. "Wish I could have been there to see that." P.J. O'Rourke
perpetuates the myth that libertarians are just Republicans who
know how to party, in his columns and his new book Peace
Kills: America's Fun New Imperialism. Larry Elder has spent
more of his time bashing the antiwar movement and praising Bush
than any self-identified libertarian probably should. R.J. Rummel,
the scholar who has amassed so much research on the history of government
acts of mass murder, came out explicitly for censorship this year,
suggesting that World War II-era command control of the media is
only appropriate, given how much our enemies hate our freedom and
want to take it away. The Randians were split in the last election
mostly over which guy would wage war more aggressively. There are
entire pro-war libertarian Web rings and message boards. Throughout
cyberspace and beyond we have seen libertarians compromise on one
issue after another for their war on terror.

When even libertarians are this trusting and forgiving of the state, we see how dangerous
warmongering can be in cultivating statism. They say it's because
the state is protecting our lives and, as Cathy Young put it, "even
in the Declaration of Independence, the right to liberty is preceded
by the right to life."

Objectivists, in particular, have come to embrace the warfare state as the source
of their freedom and well-being. On a message board recently, John
Hospers, the LP's first presidential candidate, invoked Ayn Rand's
statement that an 80% tax rate would be quite tolerable if it were
for defense spending. And of course, most of them think this war
is defensive. I asked one of them what government actions he'd tolerate
at this time of war, and he said anything, so long as it kept him
alive. This is a more common view among supposed individualist thinkers
than some in this room might imagine. What was once the libertarian,
indeed the American, slogan, of "give me liberty or give me
death" has now become "take whatever you wantjust please
don't let me die!"

So we know that war is tempting, even for people who are otherwise predisposed
to question the state's role in society. It is largely because of
this universal acceptance of foreign wars as a normal part of our
existence that the state is so quick to rally the public behind
a war. War is popular. It is easy to get people behind a war, and
war makes it easy for the state to grow.

The phenomena of increased statism and government growth during wartime have been
thoroughly examined by Robert Higgs, senior fellow at The Independent
Institute and author of such books as
Crisis
and Leviathan and his forthcoming Depression, War, and
Cold War. Never else does government grow as it does during
war. And Americans tolerate it, for their ideology has moved from
one of Jeffersonian skepticism of central power to an embrace of
it, and especially its imperial executive. People have been scared
into clinging onto the state, onto Daddy government, for the alternative
is presented as certain death and enslavement at the hands of another
people who threaten our way of life.

During Lincon's War on the Southern States, the federal government implemented conscription
for the first time, an income tax, and censorship in the form of
locking up thousands of war critics and closing down hundreds of
newspapers. During World War I, even criticizing the flag was deemed
a crime, and dissidents were imprisoned and even deported. During
World War II, America saw censorship and Japanese Internment, today
defended by some on the more warmongering right. In the Cold War
era, the feds spied on war protestors and conscription returned.
We are seeing erosions of civil liberties today, with the war on
terror, including in the suspension of habeas corpus to cage alleged
terrorists, many of whom have been freed for their innocence, and
many of whom have not but probably should be. In every case, the
state only commits such acts with the tacit consent of many Americans.

The ideology of wartime statism, and what it leads people to tolerate, is well
demonstrated in conscription, which Higgs refers to as the "keystone"
of leviathan. As Higgs points out, during World War I the Supreme
Court would argue that because it deemed conscription to be constitutional,
given the necessity of the war, it could not logically overturn
any lesser expansion of government into civil society. The Supremes
were being somewhat consistent here, and pragmatic. If you can get
people to defend military slaverywhich is of course what the
draft isyou can get them to defend practically anything
the government will do to its subjects. And only war seems to make
so many people open to slavery.

We can summarize the diagnosis for economic freedom simply by saying that war and
the free market are totally incompatible. Even the most defensible
war one can imagineto repel foreign invasionpresumably involves
taxation when the government plays a role. This alone makes every
warfare program as much an attack on the taxpaying class as welfare.
Last time I checked, we were still paying McKinley's telephone excise
tax for the Spanish-American War, though I hear there are plans
to repeal it.

Particularly devastating to the economic well-being of Americans, especially
the poor and middle class, is the central bank inflation that typically
accompanies any serious-sized war. Every major war in American history
has depended upon the power of the state to monopolize the money
supply and counterfeit dollars in mass to finance its slaughter.
It is fair to say, then, that to support war, to advocate war, is
to support this grand larceny.

No one who favors the warfare state can disown the methods by which it's financed.
It is no less economically collectivist to root for war than to
root for any other government program. If a socialist told you he
wants universal healthcare, but he does not favor the taxation and
coercion to fund and implement it, you would quickly point out his
naked contradiction. Every warmonger is an inflationist and a taxmonger,
whether he knows it or not.

To accept war is to accept the warfare state, and to accept the warfare state
is to accept all the fundamental premises of statismthe collectivism,
the aggression, the ability of central planning to succeed.

It was war that made so many opponents of the New Deal become allies of Franklin
Roosevelt once the Japanese military attacked Pearl Harbor. It was
war that transformed the right from a coalition of anti-government
Americans in the 1940s into bloodthirsty partisans of the military
establishment, its spying on antiwar protesters, its war in Vietnam,
its totalitarian bureaucracy at home and abroad. It is warmongering
that has largely changed anti-Clintonian conservatives of the 1990s,
who had at least some things in common with us, into full-blown
supporters of the imperial executive.

Ten years ago, middle America was replete with conservatives who, whatever their
faults, seemed to have a general distaste for statism and even imperialism
run amok. They resented Clinton's contempt for Constitutional limits
on his power and his abuses of civil liberties without due process.
They despised the media for toeing the administration line. They
expressed a hatred for anything having to do with governmental globalism
and the U.N. Although some of their current "red-state
fascism," as Lew Rockwell so well puts it, can be attributed
to simple partisanship, it's clear that the war on terror is the
largest factor in turning them into such state-worshippers. And
so they do not protest Bush's total disregard for the Constitution
and his abuses of civil liberties without due process. They now
despise the media for being too critical of the administration.
And they even uphold Bush's rationale for war that Saddam Hussein
failed to obey United Nations resolutions. And since when was the
conservative movement dedicated to enforcing U.N. dictates? Why,
since it could be done with a good old-fashioned war! It's obscene,
but what the right once regarded as the ultimate statism of U.N.
hegemony is now seen as part of a legitimate U.S. foreign policy.

Looking at the explosion in central administration during these last five years,
from the LBJ-style bloated augmentation of Medicare to the current
deliberation of a new New Deal for the Gulf States, we can safely
say that Bush is getting away with such socialist and corporatist
projects largely because as a war president even his more fiscally
cautious supporters don't want to fundamentally criticize him. If
I had a dollar for every time I heard a right-winger say that the
war on terror is all that's keeping him from withdrawing his enthusiastic
consent from the presidentwell, let's just say I would be pushed
into the top 1% of the people that the left thinks Bush doesn't
tax.

Consider all Bush has done on the home-front to expand statism. His spending
increases in education, his unprecedented farm subsidies, his steel
tariffs, his No Child Left Behind, his record deficits, his ID cards,
his homeland security bureaucracythe conservatives and warmongering
libertarians look the other way, at least more so than they would
if a peacetime president pushed these through. If the president
is protecting you from terrorists, after all, how can you complain
when your pocket is picked? How can you complain when he picks the
pockets of others?

Whether we look at economic policy, civil liberties, or any other indicator,
America got its big, consolidated government during Polk's war,
Lincoln's war, Wilson's war, FDR's war, Truman's war, Eisenhower,
Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon's war, and the two Bush wars, far more
than it got leviathan during peacetime. Even the domestic Progressive
Era and peacetime New Deal looked like golden eras of laissez faire
when contrasted with the wars that soon followed them. Madison said
that tyranny would come to this land only under the guise of fighting
a foreign enemy. One hundred ninety-three years after his unnecessary
war with Britain, I must say he was right.

We can trace the decline of liberty, the rise of collectivism, and the advent
of the current regime in this country, and see the principal role
that war has always had in advancing the state. To love all the
big wars of America's past is to love the current leviathan. To
seek more war for the future is to wish for the state to grow.

This faith in the warfare state, as bad as it is in allowing for domestic government
criminality, is even worse in desensitizing people to the horrors
of war that they can't see. When we're up against evil incarnate
such as Osama bin Laden or a new Hitler such as Saddam Hussein or
Milosevic, Americans will remarkably acquiesce to nearly any atrocity
committed in their nameas long as it has a humanitarian veneer,
perversely enough. The idea is that if, for example, the imperial
Japanese government is brutal and murderous, it is somehow justifiable
to firebomb sixty of their cities and drop two nuclear weapons on
hundreds of thousands of civilians. If the U.S. government is fighting
the evil Korean or Vietnamese communists, it is allowed to kill
hundreds of thousands in strategic bombing of civilian targets and
indiscriminate napalm attacks on villagers. If the U.S. government
is combating Milosevic's ethnic cleansing, it can kill as many innocent
Serbs and Albanians as necessary. And if it's uprooting Saddam's
regime, virtually any number of innocents killed by U.S. tactical
missiles and shootings is tolerable, so long as Saddam killed more.

During the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, how many conservatives shrugged it off
as nothing, seeing as how Saddam treated his people worse? How many
don't care about U.S. chemical warfare on Iraqis, since Saddam gassed
more? Once there's a war, the standard is not individual life and
liberty. The new standard is the real and perceived evils of the
enemy you're fighting. And those evils, the war party never ceases
to remind us, might as well be those of the Devil himself.

But even Saddam allowed the people of Baghdad to have firearms that the U.S.-allied
puppet government deemed verboten and rounded up violently. Where
was the outrage among the pro-war libertarians and the Second-Amendment
conservatives? Well, until the U.S. government secures freedom there,
the rights of individual Iraqis can hardly count for anything, right?
This is the explicit line of argument of many conservatives, so-called
libertarians and Objectivists. Sometimes, to build a democratized
omelette, you have to break 10,000 eggs.

And democracy has, for many free-market hawks, become the new goal. There is a
theory about democracies never fighting each other, and how peaceful
it would be if the world became more democratic. Most believers
in the theory believe that the U.S. government should democratize
the world, even if through war, so as to secure peace. There are
many little problems with imperial democratic peace theorythe
shifting definitions these theorists use, the near unfalsifiability
of it, the terrible track record the U.S. has in actually promoting
democracybut we can only stand baffled by the general notion
of perpetual war for democracy and perpetual democracy for peace.
Since when did libertarians and conservatives equate freedom and
democracy? Since when did they conflate elections with freedom,
and think foreigners were free if they could vote? Since when did
any of us think that a so-called free country could slaughter foreigners
in mass numbers, so long as it is to minimize non-democratic aggression
in the long run?

Say what you will about these arguments, but they run counter to the essence
of libertarian philosophy. Why would a libertarian trust this crude
calculus of minimizing mass murder through mass murder with the
bureaucratic central planning of the state? To do so elevates the
U.S. to the status of an omniscient and omnipotent Godlike entity,
capable and ethical in its determinations of who should live and
who should die everywhere on the planet. It presumes that the state
should grant liberty to the world, that it should manage not just
one domestic industry, but the entire evolution of global humanity
towards a more civilized end. For the adherents to this belief,
freedom is just one more big government program.

And of course, all those wars have not been good and necessary for liberty,
and there were always intolerable atrocities committed without even
a pragmatic justification. When Wilson and his allies starved German
civilians, when FDR and Truman dropped terror from the skies on
innocents in Europe and Asia, when LBJ napalmed Vietnam and Nixon
torched Cambodia, when Bush's army raped Fallujahnone of these
acts were necessary, or defensive.

Furthermore, the U.S. government has a stunning legacy of teaming up with freedom
fighters today that become Satan's vanguard tomorrow. The U.S. allied
with Stalin during World War II and was at times quite obliging
of him, such as with Operation Keelhaul, when the U.S. and other
allies forced 2 million refugees onto planes, boats and boxcars
and shipped them back to certain slavery and death under Stalin.
Then the U.S. turned around and said Stalin's evil empire justified
the expansion of an American empire. Fighting in the Cold war for
some reason involved financing, funding and training various two-bit
dictators, including some of the tyrants, despots and terrorists
who are now considered worth inciting orgies of death abroad to
combat.

Even if you don't like the methodological individualistic view that the U.S.
government shouldn't be allowed to dispose of some liberties and
lives for the sake of saving others, a look at the historical record
should dissuade you from favoring war. It does seem, however, that
most who reject the moral arguments also reject the practical ones.
They have made up their minds. The state is on their side, and in
return they will look the other way when it is revealed that intolerable
evil has been committed on their behalf.

But it is these intolerable evils that have put America at risk. The 9/11 hijackers
acted in response to a foreign policy that had killed many thousands
of innocents in the Middle East. This should have been the main
point made by all friends of liberty immediately following the attacksnot
only to point blame at the U.S. warfare state, but also to
show the way to actual security. As long as the U.S. empire continues
to butt its nose into the affairs of other countries, we are in
danger. These wars undermine our liberties and our national
defense. For all these reasons, we must count our blessings for
institutions such as LewRockwell.com,
Antiwar.com, The
Mises Institute, The Independent
Institute, and the Future of Freedom
Foundation; and for every libertarian who opposes the warfare
state as the greatest threat to our freedom and safety.

War is, as Randolph Bourne put it,
the health of the state. Moreover, advocating
for war, mongering for war, apologizing for warthese are the
health of statism. Nothing else can so make an otherwise libertarian
mind tolerate the wholesale theft of taxation and inflation. Nothing
else can so make an otherwise skeptical mind, wary of environmentalist
hysteria and bad economic thinking, trust the state with his liberty
and money and the lives of thousands of others. Nothing else can
so lead a person who claims individualism to favor the mass butchery
of innocent people he'd have no quarrel with otherwise. And while
it is sometimes tempting to favor and difficult to oppose, nothing
else destroys property like war. Nothing else threatens liberty
like war. Nothing else dispenses with lives like war.

We must stand firm against the government's wars of aggression. We must substantively
attack the collectivist concept that violating the rights of foreigners
is an acceptable way to defend their freedom, and our own. We must
relentlessly defend civil liberty and the free market against the
incomparably rapacious destruction of the warfare state. We must
demonstrate at every proper opportunity that the imperial war machine
is aggressive by nature and inimical to freedom in practice.

If warmongering is the health of statism, loving and championing peace are at the
core of libertarian thinking. The very essence of freedom is, in
fact, peaceto be at peace to live your life as you see fit, without
the politicians milking your bank account dry, sponsoring economic
interests against you, or condemning you to a jail cell for personal
and peaceful behavior. Once you embrace peace and call into question
the warfare state, which is the primary justification for leviathan
and its growth, the entire philosophy of statism falls under scrutiny.
If the state is not even just and effective in protecting you from
and slaying the world's monsters, what good is it at all?

As libertarians,
we must embrace peace.
We must reach out to other opponents of
the war and explain that statism is the ideology of war, and liberty
is its only remedy. Some think such outreach is futile or counterproductive,
given the leftist views of so many other doves. Well, whatever we
might say about the collectivist beliefs of many peaceniks, we know
that America cannot have liberty while it is at a constant state
of war, and we know that no program for liberty can succeed so long
as it makes the gaping exception for the international socialist
project of mass murder known as modern war. Just as war is the enemy
of a free civilization, so too is warmongering the enemy of a libertarian
disposition, and of a rational mind. It is the health of statism,
and if statism is to be opposedand it isthen we must confront
the warmongers and their arguments with all the passion, energy
and sincerity with which we approach any other deed in the struggle
for liberty.

Anthony Gregory is a writer and musician who lives in Berkeley, California. He is
a research analyst at the Independent
Institute. See his webpage for more
articles and personal information.